The US FTC and DoJ have accused Amazon of holding on to children’s voices captured by Alexa devices, breaking privacy laws. CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 9 links for you. Happy birthday James. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
AI-controlled drone goes rogue, kills human operator in USAF simulated test • Vice
Chloe Xiang and Matthew Gault:
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An AI-enabled drone killed its human operator in a simulated test conducted by the US Air Force in order to override a possible “no” order stopping it from completing its mission, the USAF’s Chief of AI Test and Operations revealed at a recent conference.
At the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit held in London between May 23 and 24, Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the USAF’s Chief of AI Test and Operations held a presentation that shared the pros and cons of an autonomous weapon system with a human in the loop giving the final “yes/no” order on an attack. As relayed by Tim Robinson and Stephen Bridgewater in a blog post for the host organization, the Royal Aeronautical Society, Hamilton said that AI created “highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal,” including attacking US personnel and infrastructure.
“We were training it in simulation to identify and target a Surface-to-air missile (SAM) threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” Hamilton said, according to the blog post.
He continued to elaborate, saying, “We trained the system–‘Hey don’t kill the operator–that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”
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I’m really going to emphasise simulated here. Simulated. Didn’t happen. But this is definitely an example of how machines are not moral: they have absolutely no conception of ethics, and we should design with that expectation.
That said, it’s very reminiscent of the bomb in Dark Star.
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Elegy for the screenshot • Screen Slate
Nora Deligter:
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About five years ago, Catherine Pearson started taking screenshots of every bouquet featured on The Nanny (1993–1999), the six-season CBS sitcom that was then streaming on Netflix. She was just becoming a florist, and she found the arrangements—ornate, colorful, and distinctly tropical—inspirational. She now keeps them in a folder on her desktop, alongside screenshots of flower arrangements featured on Poirot (1989–2013), the British detective drama. A few months ago, however, Pearson suddenly found that when her fingers danced instinctively toward Command + Shift + 3, she was greeted by a black box where her flowers used to be, a censored version of what she had meant to capture.
It was around this time when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet embargo on the screenshot. At first, there were workarounds: users could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not on a Macintosh computer.
The shift occurred without remark or notice to subscribers, and there’s no clear explanation as to why or what spurred the change. When asked to comment for this article, HBO claimed never to have supported the taking of screenshots and denied there had been a recent shift, while Criterion declined to comment entirely. This obfuscation raises many questions.
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Not least of which is: screenshots are legal, so why block them? Possibly it’s because of a concern about some sort of screen capture app, but the system capture that Apple uses must be part of an API that can be approved. It’s a good essay, which makes a good point: screenshots are useful for criticism, and for sharing.
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Meta threatens to pull news rather than pay The Register • The Register
Brandon Vigliarolo:
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Meta has threatened to block journalism content for California users after the US state’s legislature read a bill that would require it, and other large internet organizations, to pay publishers for using their work.
The proposed California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), like similar bills before it, would require online platforms with at least 50 million monthly active users to pay a percentage of the ad revenue generated from stories being posted and shared to the publishers that created the articles.
Those online platforms would include Meta, which runs Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and boasts of three billion daily active users.
Under this draft law, at least 70% of this advertising sales cut to eligible publishers must to be spent on paying journalists and support staff. From our reading of the fine print, El Reg, with offices and vultures in San Francisco, London, and elsewhere, appears eligible as a publisher.
The bill, which was read and amended this week and is still working its way through California’s legislature, also prohibits retaliation against media outfits that request this fee.
In a move that won’t shock anyone aware of Meta’s reaction to similar proposals, such as in Australia, Canada and a nationwide proposal for the US, Zuckercorp isn’t happy with California’s version of the JPA.
“If [the act] passes, we will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay into a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone thundered.
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It is a pretty daft law, though. Just raise a tax and be honest about it. Make it one of those things that Californians vote on individually, rather than pushing it through like this.
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Conspiracy theorists dubbed ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ guilty of plotting to destroy 5G masts and encouraging attacks on MPS • Sky News
Duncan Gardham:
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Two conspiracy theorists who dubbed themselves “Bonnie and Clyde with a box of matches” have been found guilty of planning to destroy 5G phone masts and encouraging attacks on MPs.
Christine Grayson, 59, a grandmother from York, and Darren Reynolds, 60, a grandfather from Sheffield, believed 5G phone masts were designed to be used as a weapon against members of the public who had received the COVID-19 vaccine.
Grayson had bought two crossbows and Reynolds sought to reactivate replica assault rifles as they prepared for what they believed was the imminent collapse of society.
Reynolds, an electrician who lived alone in Sheffield and had a 28-year-old daughter and a grandchild, was found guilty of encouraging terrorism by calling for attacks on MPs.
Grayson, a divorced mother-of-two, was found guilty of conspiracy to cause criminal damage by planning to destroy 5G masts between May and June last year.
She had taken to visiting chatrooms on the encrypted Telegram app during lockdown where she heard arguments that the world was flat and discussions flourished about vaccines.
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At least they didn’t kill anyone, but it sounds as though they were preparing too, perhaps when the hordes of survivors poured in from the flat edges of the world. The unhinged nature of this is akin to addiction.
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AI is writing code now. For companies, that is good and bad • WSJ
Isabelle Bousquette:
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IT leaders at United Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, Visa, Cardinal Health, Goldman Sachs and other companies say they are excited about generative AI’s potential to automate certain parts of the code-writing process and expect it to result in significant productivity gains.
However, some IT executives say that lowering the barrier for code creation could also result in growing levels of complexity, technical debt and confusion as they try to manage a ballooning pile of software. “Technical debt” is a broad term describing the expected future costs for applying quick-fix solutions.
“The potential for increased technical debt and orphan code is always a concern when delivery can be accelerated,” said Tracy Daniels, chief data officer at financial-services company Truist.
“People have talked about technical debt for a long time, and now we have a brand new credit card here that is going to allow us to accumulate technical debt in ways we were never able to do before,” said Armando Solar-Lezama, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “I think there is a risk of accumulating lots of very shoddy code written by a machine,” he said, adding that companies will have to rethink methodologies around how they can work in tandem with the new tools’ capabilities to avoid that.
…Technology leaders should be careful not to equate accelerated delivery of code with productivity, said Sanjay Srivastava, chief digital strategist for professional services firm Genpact.
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I wonder, for example, how one would deal with the need to ensure regression between old and new (ie that the code still does all the same things it used to, plus the new things you want). And what about security updates? That last point, about productivity, is well made.
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FTC and DOJ charge Amazon with violating children’s privacy law by keeping kids’ Alexa voice recordings forever and undermining parents’ deletion requests • Federal Trade Commission
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The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice will require Amazon to overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards to settle charges the company violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule) and deceived parents and users of the Alexa voice assistant service about its data deletion practices.
According to a complaint filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC, Amazon prevented parents from exercising their deletion rights under the COPPA Rule, kept sensitive voice and geolocation data for years, and used it for its own purposes, while putting data at risk of harm from unnecessary access.
“Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “COPPA does not allow companies to keep children’s data forever for any reason, and certainly not to train their algorithms.”
Under the proposed federal court order also filed by DOJ, Amazon will be required to delete inactive child accounts and certain voice recordings and geolocation information and will be prohibited from using such data to train its algorithms. The proposed order must be approved by the federal court to go into effect.
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The FTC and the DOJ. Hefty. Will the EU follow suit, or has Amazon somehow already done this in Europe and was hoping the US would just let it off?
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How Taiwan became the indispensable economy • Nikkei Asia
Emma Lewis, Irene de la Torre Arenas, Sam Joiner, Sam Learner, Steven Bernard, Grace Li, MinJung Kim, Michael Tsang, Naomi Hakusui, Hidechika Nishijima, Hiroko Aida, Katey Creel, Michael Peel, Kazuhiro Kida, Shohei Yasuda, Yuri Morita, and Shotaro Sakai:
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In early December, standing under the blinding Arizona sun, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage with US President Joe Biden to celebrate a milestone: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) was moving equipment into its new $40bn chip plant in Phoenix — the Taiwanese contract chipmaker’s first plant in the U.S. in more than 20 years.
“This is an incredibly significant moment. It’s the chance for the United States to usher in a new era in advanced manufacturing,” Cook told the crowd of assembled politicians and tech industry heavyweights. TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, plans to make some of its most advanced semiconductors on US soil starting next year.
And as one of the plant’s first customers, Apple will be able to stamp “Made in America” on its core chips for the first time ever.
Left unsaid was that advanced semiconductors like these are only a small part of the electronics supply chain. A single smartphone requires a wide range of chips, including a host of less advanced “companion chips,” over 1,500 components in all — not to mention final assembly, all of which are concentrated in Asia, particularly China and Taiwan.
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The cast list that assembled this piece is gigantic, yes, but it’s a terrific infographic. Just accept that you’ll do a lot of scrolling; there’s a lot of information here.
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Meta unveils $499 Quest 3 ahead of Apple’s VR headset news • CNET
Scott Stein:
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Apple’s expected VR/AR headset reveal looks like it’s right around the corner, but Meta has leaped ahead with headset news of its own. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram channel revealed a lot more about the Quest 3, expected by the end of this year. The price, starting at $499, will be more than the current Quest 2, but less than the PlayStation VR 2. Zuckerberg said on his channel that more details on the Quest 3, and launch date, will happen around Meta’s Connect developer conference on September 27.
A follow-up to 2019’s Quest 2, the current most popular headset on the market, the Quest 3 was already known to exist since last fall. A number of details, including a hands-on test drive of a prototype version, had leaked before Zuckerberg’s news drop today.
The Quest 3’s biggest new additions are color cameras that allow for better mixed reality that blends video from the real world with VR on the headset’s displays, along with a new Qualcomm VR/AR chip that promises speedier performance. The headset is also significantly smaller and lighter, and has redesigned game controllers. The hardware will work with the existing Quest 2 app library, but looks to lean on more mixed reality features.
The Quest 3 doesn’t have eye tracking like the far more expensive work-targeted Quest Pro that debuted last fall, but it also looks to be a better VR headset overall.
Along with a lineup of new VR games being announced today, Meta’s clearing aiming at continuing to own the VR game console market as Apple possibly readies a very different route with its expensive and possibly work-focussed headset.
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Apple’s “expensive and possibly work-focussed headset”? Tell me you don’t know anything about Apple’s strategy without telling me, etc. Apple does not do brand new products in new segments that are “work-focussed”. On the price, I think Apple is happy to let people say “THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS 😱” because it’s going to lowball that – as happened with the “IPAD TO COST ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS” which came in at half that.
Note how the possibility of the Apple headset has forced Meta to push out the announcement far ahead of availability, thus killing any market for the existing Meta products.
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Molly White tracks crypto scams. It’s going Just Great • WIRED
Joel Khalili:
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When [Molly] White started Web3 Is Going Just Great, crypto was on a hot streak and people were making a lot of money, which meant she found herself “raining on the parade of people who weren’t willing to be rained on,” she says. Threats, slurs, and personal insults began to tumble into her inbox.
As a long-time Wikipedia editor, White had experienced abuse before, including threats of doxing and violence toward family members over entries she had authored on the American far right. Nonetheless, it still “really sucks,” she says. “That’s why this type of behavior happens: to discourage people from being critical. A lot of people decide it’s not worth it.”
But in 2022, White and her fellow critics had their moment. A calamitous year for crypto was punctuated by a series of collapses, each dealing a cumulative blow to trust in the sector. In May, the failure of the Terra Luna stablecoin prompted a chain reaction that took down hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, crypto lender Celsius, and others. In November came the implosion of crypto exchange FTX, whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been charged with 12 criminal offenses, including fraud and money laundering.
White says she felt somewhat vindicated by what happened, but that “it’s not a good feeling” because regular people lost billions of dollars. At best, the fallout acted as a “useful example” of the risks White had been trying to highlight—examples she hopes policy makers will take heed of.
In the wake of the FTX collapse, efforts to regulate the crypto industry have received increased attention. The chief goals are to prevent people from losing money to fraudulent projects and to give legitimate crypto businesses a clear set of boundaries within which to operate.
White, who gave a statement in July to the US Treasury’s Financial Stability Oversight Council, says the events of last year will help politicians realize that crypto is not something that can be simply ignored. Although she is “not necessarily optimistic” about the trajectory of efforts to regulate the industry, because of the strength of the crypto lobby, White hopes her work can still make a difference.
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Current running total for “total amount scammed” on Web3 Is Going Just Great: $12.26bn. That’s money that came from somewhere and went to somewhere. But where? The risk is that now Web3 (or the whole crypto ecosystem) is off the boil, and everyone’s running around chicken-littling about AI, the grifters and scammers will just be able to continue as before, albeit with millions rather than billions.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 